#barring other power structures like financial control and employment and politics

[bread-tab]

It's true that there's a set of tyrannical old people who are unfairly influential. But being old is not what gave them power.

There's a certain kind of insidious propaganda regarding marginalized groups, an idea that targets young people but affects everyone... "People like you don't survive that long."

It's that stupid myth that "trans women have a life expectancy of 33."

It's when you come out to your mom and she says "it's just a phase."

It's the understanding that there are autistic kids, but complete ignorance about autistic adults.

There's this idea that the "weird" people either get fixed somehow, or they just... go away. And if you absorb this belief you will feel so much more isolated.

Pay attention to your marginalized elders. Not just for their sakes, but for yours. Not because their life experience means you "have to" listen to them (you don't), but because they are living proof that you are allowed to exist and continue being yourself. Because their stories can teach you so much about bravery, both the loud bravery of defiance and the quiet bravery of persistence.

Treasure your elders not because they are elders but because under all the generation gaps and wrinkles and culture clashes, they are your people. They have traveled far through time to meet you.

Look beyond the surface that is being sold to you. You never know where you will find a kindred spirit.

You don’t hate the elderly; you hate people who are living long lives at the expense of others, people whose longevity is made possible via suffering and injustice. There is no generational conflict and there never has been. You have more in common with old people living in poverty than you ever will with someone who watched the same TV shows you did when you were both twelve. 

[arcticdementor]

I’m going to describe your least favorite politician: Everything they say goes viral. The establishment despises them, donors can’t influence them, and the media can’t tame them. They’ve ignored the traditional rules of politics and now, politics will never be the same. Their success is a threat to America.

…

Okay, one more thought experiment. I’m going to describe an industry. Then, you’re going to guess which one I’m talking about. You have three choices: commerce, education, or politics.

Since World War II, the industry has been relatively stable. The big players haven’t changed. They’ve built relationships with financiers and journalists. Until recently, the industry structure looked like it would exist forever.

But now, things are changing. Within the industry, the pace of change is quick. When people talk about the industry, they talk about madness and uncertainty. Weird things are happening. The future is uncertain. The establishment doesn’t control the industry like it once did. The establishment’s decline is giving rise to a new breed of internet-natives, who are following a new playbook that the establishment cannot compete against.

Commerce, education or politics: Which industry am I talking about?

The answer: All the above. Yep, you read that right. The exact same thing is happening in all three industries.

…

I’ll show how the shift from information scarcity to information abundance is transforming commerce, education, and politics. The structure of each industry was shaped by the information-scarce, Mass Media environment. First, we’ll focus on commerce. Education will be second. Then, we’ll zoom out for a short history of America since World War II. We’ll see how information scarcity creates authority and observe the effects of the internet on knowledge. Finally, we’ll return to politics and tie these threads together.

…

America’s biggest Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies are losing market share. Across consumer goods industries, brand loyalty is dying. The percentage of affluent consumers in the top 5% of household income who can identify their favorite brand is in sharp decline (see Figure 1).

The reason is simple: brands are about trust and signaling. They’re a substitute for incomplete information. When information is scarce and asymmetric, consumers flock to trusted brands. But in many parts of the economy, when consumers have reviews at their fingertips, they no longer defer to brands when they make a purchasing decision.

…

By creating unlimited shelf space and reducing information asymmetries, power in the internet age is shifting from suppliers to customers. The world is increasingly demand driven. Customers have more choices than ever before. They can buy anything, at any time. Through the internet, brands can serve a long-tail of unmet consumer needs, which weren’t served by big box retailers. Small direct-to-consumer brands are popping up left and right. Their products go beyond their utilitarian purposes and reflect the identities of people who buy them. From dairy-free yogurt, to anti-razor bump grooming products, to the assortment of milks (oat, almond, skim, soy, coconut, rice, hemp, plant, cashew, macadamia, hazelnut, pea, flax, peanut, walnut) so large that you need a rolodex to keep track of them all, the products themselves differentiate these upstart brands from incumbents.

…

Like a fish in water, we’re unaware of the integration between our education system, the corporate structure, and our media environment.

Education flows down from the needs of employers. Companies outsource their recruiting efforts to universities, who gauge the quality of applicants on their behalf. Employers benefit, but students pay the price in time and debt. Accreditation is a signal of competence, so HR directors save time and money by restricting their applicant pool to graduates from top-tier universities. Ivy League graduates, for example, passed a quality bar which made them attractive to employers.

…

The system wasn’t always so crazy. Historically, there was a strong correlation between the reputation of the university and the quality of its education. Limited by the reach of their words, before the internet, top-tier professors could only teach hundreds of students at a time. Since professors couldn’t record or distribute their lectures, students had to witness them first-hand.

…

Paradoxically, as college degrees become commoditized, the cost of acquiring them continues to rise. Since 1991, tuition has increased by more than 300%, according to the US Department of Labor’s “tuition and school fees” component of the Consumer Price Index.

Tuition isn’t rising because professor pay has increased. Instruction costs accounted for only 28% of cost increases from 2000 to 2010. Faculty salaries have not risen proportionally to these tuition increases.

Colleges can stagnate and it doesn’t matter. The value of education can only be measured on a long, multi-decade time cycle. Even then, the success of alumni is a result of a multitude of factors, which are difficult to isolate and account for. Since there’s no way to measure the quality of an education, universities are gauged by superficial optics such as sticker price, acceptance rates, and questionable rankings systems.

As their monopoly on information disappeared, colleges justify their existence with increased amenities. Money that isn't spent is re-allocated to other departments, so there’s no incentive to save. Expensive new initiatives present a problem: as long as money is available, it will be spent; as long as it is spent, total costs will increase. These incentives trickle down through the organization, causing costs to skyrocket.

We’re bankrupting our students. The percentage of student borrowers with $20,000 or more in student debt has doubled over the last decade. Half of those borrowers don’t begin paying off principal until they’re 35. Student debt is a full-blown national crisis.

…

Due to the information explosion, society’s faith in institutions is corroding.

The grand hierarchies of the Industrial Age are in decline. Large institutions used to be like a Swiss army knife, equipped with tools for any scenario. They tackled problems forcefully and shouldered the responsibility of society’s greatest challenges. High-achieving college graduates dreamed of working for big companies such as AT&T, Ford, and Dow Chemical. Instead of leading a small business, people felt that serving as a cog in a large, industrial machine offered a higher point of leverage.

…

The tide has shifted and people don’t trust authority like they used to. The same institutions that once commanded so much American praise have lost their edge and versatility. They look less like a Swiss army knife and more like your grandma’s dull, rusty, 19th-century butter knife. They’re slow and stodgy, bloated and inefficient.

Political risk is growing in parallel. The rumble of instability is louder and louder each day. Threats of revolution are visible around the world, at a faster and faster rate.

…

No individual illustrates the media’s all-encompassing influence better than Walter Cronkite. “The Most Trusted Man in America” served as an anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years. Cronkite’s nickname was rooted in fact. According to The Quayle Poll, a survey which measured trust in public figures, Cronkite sat at the top of the list and was the only newsman to appear on it. Everybody else on the list of trusted people was a politician. Yes, you read that right. Times have changed.

…

What does "The Cronkite Moment" say about politics in the age of broadcasting?

When information sources were limited, we traded truth for coherence.

Trigger warning: the media was never truthful. There, I said it. To be fair, the media didn’t actively deceive the public either. Rather, a small number of editors and journalists had outsized influence over public opinion, and naturally they had blind spots. Their errors of omission included Kennedy’s affairs, Johnson’s corruption, and Reagan’s dementia. News editors were like high priests, standing in front of an obedient society, perched upon a pulpit, made strong by a direct line to millions of Americans.

As the three letter outlets waved their batons, the masses responded like sheep. In pursuit of social cohesion, the range of opinions were kept artificially narrow. Even when media outlets disagreed with each other, they operated within an implicit set of assumptions and a narrow range of acceptable opinions. Media moguls had more than money; they had power. Absolute power. Even when inaccuracies were reported, consumers couldn’t respond at scale.

…

During the 20th century, as the world became more complex, information flows simplified.

Like a coxswain yelling to his team of obedient rowers, leaders controlled the dissemination of information and determined the movement of the entire group. Even as global population skyrocketed from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000, media driven cohesion kept the group together. Millions of people moved in near-magical synchronicity. Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!

…

Narrative control is no longer monopolized. The arbiters of truth have fragmented. Millions of people, historically constrained by the reach and spread of their ideas, can theoretically reach anybody in the world with an internet connection. The truth has always existed, but until recently, we haven’t had the means to uncover and distribute it.

…

The shifts we’ve outlined so far can be seen in the changing of the guard from Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia.

Even as Wikipedia gained traction, only a small percentage of people thought Wikipedia stood a chance against Encyclopedia Britannica. These skeptics were informed by precedent. Since the Egyptian Library of Alexandria , knowledge had been monopolized by institutions and certified by authoritative people who separated fact from fiction.

…

Britannica was costly to use. It was heavy and hard to search through. There were many volumes, and owning them all was prohibitively expensive. Carrying a Britannica dictionary felt like lifting weights at the gym. If you could carry all of them, you deserved a gold medal at the Olympics. The information inside the covers was expensive to transport, so the encyclopedias cost a pretty penny. Due to its ubiquitous brand recognition, Britannica had the final word. Everybody trusted it.

Wikipedia is the opposite.

It’s free, not expensive; digital, not analog; crowd-sourced, not editor-driven; continually updated, not fixed forever. Britannica is organized by subjects, Wikipedia by hyperlinks. Britannica is organized in alphabetical order. Wikipedia is a web of references with no beginning or end. Wikipedia is made by the people, for the people. It’s a collective memory machine where knowledge is accessible to everybody with a smartphone. All of Wikipedia — yes, every single article — can be saved for offline access, right on your smartphone.

…

Rather than controlling speech itself, people can control speech by determining the limits of acceptable conversation. As Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics said: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”

Before cable, the limits of acceptable speech were enforced by political parties, who, due to their incentives for mass appeal, encouraged political centrism. With the stroke of a pen, small groups set narratives for the masses. Every town has one or two newspapers and three TV stations — all centrist, pro-business, and respectful of authority. Newspapers and television stations monopolized the distribution of information within their local territory. Through their power, they built social cohesion by eliminating diverse opinion and creating a shared intellectual ground for citizens.

…

Political parties are bigger than the people who work for them. They are a set of relationships and a well of tactical knowledge. They consist of partisan media members, advertisers, donors, associations, interest groups, consultants, and of course, politicians. Political parties built intimate relationships with donors to fund their advertising efforts. Local organizations, such as churches and labor unions lead get-out-the-vote efforts.

…

Voter interests were a means, not an end. In exchange for voter support, political parties ensured the election of their politicians by building relationships with editors, journalists, and media executives.

Now, that’s changing.

The media’s monopoly saw its first cracks with the rise of cable, and now, due to the internet, the Mass Media environment is going to crumble. The internet — where everyone can find, select, edit, and distribute content — has already left its mark. The Overton Window has been shattered. The media is no longer a barrier against diverse thought and opinion. Extreme opinions, which were once squashed by the Mass Media environment, can survive on the internet, where a viral message can spread to every corner of the globe.

…

As power shifts from a small mass of powerful constituents to a large mass of individual voters, politicians serve the voters directly instead of the needs of their political parties, where voters were just a means to an end. As the balance of power shifts away from political party affiliates to communication maestros, donors can no longer dictate political outcomes.

Every new medium of communication produces a chain of revolutionary consequences at every level of politics. Like a mountain range long in the distance, despite the hazy details of a future difficult to interpret, we can see the general outlines. The influencers of today are the politicians of tomorrow. Candidates with reach have organic built-in distribution, access to owned data and organic customer insights, and lower get-out-the-vote costs. Media savviness will be an essential skill for political success.

How people look and speak will be crucial to their success, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the politicians of tomorrow look more like celebrities than traditional politicians.

…

The 2016 Presidential Election was our waking up moment.

Trump has exposed the media’s weaknesses. As an observer, I was struck by the disconnect between what the media reported and the feelings of Americans on the ground. The media played one game. Trump played another. Trump’s campaign was loud, colorful and aggressive. Like a circus, eyes were glued to the show. Donald Trump invested little in traditional advertising, de-legitimized major media outlets, and connected with voters directly. Even as he invested less in advertising than Clinton or his Republican opponents, he dominated the media coverage and received unprecedented levels of attention. His apparent shortcomings helped, not hurt, his candidacy. Attacks benefited his campaign.

The media was caught in a Catch-22: cover Trump and he’ll win the election; ignore him and you’ll lose viewers and revenue. Media businesses thrived during the election. The rate of growth for New York Times newspaper subscriptions increased ten-fold over the previous year. Cable news viewership exploded during the election, which boosted ad revenue.

…

In short, as the amount of information exploded, the media — with business models built for an environment of information scarcity — engaged in a Faustian Bargain. Naval Ravikant said it best: "The Internet commoditized the distribution of facts. The ‘news’ media responded by pivoting wholesale into opinions and entertainment."

To be sure, I don’t want to ascribe too much weight to Trump’s election. I’m conscious of the human tendency to ignore probabilities in hindsight and wrap a narrative around every event, with a bias towards recent ones. With that said, I am confident of this: President Trump would not have won under the old Mass Media laws of media and politics. Trump's win was made possible by the shift from information scarcity to information abundance. People are overwhelmed by the volume of information and contradictions between media outlets.

…

People who scapegoat Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg miss a fundamental truth. Twitter didn’t happen to politics. Facebook didn’t happen to politics. The internet happened to politics. The shifts are structural and until we understand that, we can’t have an intelligent conversation about the state of the world. The common narratives, which are exaggerated by the media’s incentive to sensationalize the news, blind us to the real problems that plague society.

…

Big institutions, whose dominance once seemed eternal, are on the brink of collapse.

The explosion of information has undermined and obsoleted the 20th-century organizational model. Big brands are losing market share. Big universities are going bankrupt. Big political parties are splintering and losing their control over the political narrative. In their wake, small businesses who connect with audiences and serve the unique needs of consumers are thriving; digitally-native universities who can educate, entertain, accredit, and find work for students will blossom; likewise, politicians who can bypass the media and connect with voters directly are commanding attention, influencing policy and stepping into office.

[reeiiedu]

DEVELOPMENT OF RESOURCES

Assets

Everything in our current circumstance which can be utilized to fulfill our necessities and is innovatively available, monetarily attainable and socially worthy is named as 'Asset'. Individuals themselves are fundamental parts of assets. They change material accessible in the climate into assets and use them.

Characterization of Resources

Assets can be characterized in the accompanying manners:

(a) based on beginning – biotic and abiotic

(b) based on exhaustibility – sustainable and non-inexhaustible

(c) based on possession – singular, network, public and worldwide

(d) based on the status of improvement – potential, created stock and saves

Characterization of Resources

(an) On the Basis of Origin – Biotic and Abiotic

Biotic Resources are acquired from the biosphere and have life.

Eg: Human creatures, vegetation, fisheries, domesticated animals and so forth.

Abiotic Resources: All those things which are made out of non-living things are called abiotic assets.

Eg: shakes and metals.

(b) On the Basis of Exhaustibility – Renewable and Non-Renewable

The assets which can be restored or replicated by physical, compound or mechanical cycles are known as Renewable or Replenishable Resources. The inexhaustible asset may additionally be separated into constant or stream.

Eg: Solar and wind energy, water, woodlands and untamed life, and so forth.

Non-Renewable Resources happen over an extremely long topographical time. These assets take a huge number of years in their development. A portion of the assets like metals are recyclable and some like petroleum products can't be reused and get depleted with their utilization.

Eg: Minerals and petroleum products.

(c) On the Basis of Ownership – Individual, Community, National and International

Singular Resources are possessed secretly by people. In towns individuals own territories though in metropolitan zones individuals own plots, houses and different properties.

Eg: Plantation, field lands, lakes, water in wells and so forth.

Network Owned Resources are open to all the individuals from the network.

Eg: Grazing grounds, cemetery, public parks, excursion spots, play areas and so forth.

Public Resources are claimed by a country or nation. All the minerals, water assets, timberlands, untamed life, land inside the political limits and maritime region up to 12 nautical miles (22.2 km) from the coast named as regional water and assets in that have a place with the country.

Eg: Roads, channels, railroads and so on.

Global Resources are controlled by worldwide foundations. The maritime assets past 200 nautical miles of the Exclusive Economic Zone have a place with vast sea and no individual nation can use these without the simultaneousness of worldwide organizations.

(d) On the Basis of the Status of Development – Potential, Developed Stock and Reserves

Potential Resources are the assets which are found in an area yet have not been used.

Eg: Rajasthan and Gujarat have gigantic potential for the advancement of wind and sun powered energy, however so far these have not been grown appropriately.

Created Resources: Resources which are reviewed and their quality and amount have been resolved for use. The advancement of assets relies upon innovation and level of their possibility.

Materials in the climate which can possibly fulfill human needs however individuals don't have the fitting innovation to get to these, are called Stock.

Eg: Hydrogen can be utilized as a rich wellspring of energy. However, we don't have trend setting innovation to utilize it.

Stores are the subset of the stock, which can be placed into utilization with the assistance of existing specialized 'skill' yet their utilization has not been begun. These can be utilized for meeting future prerequisites.

Eg: Water in the dams, backwoods and so on is a save which can be utilized later on.

Improvement of Resources

Assets have been utilized by individuals unpredictably and this has prompted the accompanying serious issues.

Exhaustion of assets for fulfilling the avarice of a couple of people.

Aggregation of assets in a couple of hands, which, thus, separated the general public into two fragments i.e rich and poor.

It has prompted worldwide biological emergencies, for example, an Earth-wide temperature boost, ozone layer consumption, natural contamination and land debasement.

Asset arranging is fundamental for the feasible presence of all types of life. Supportable Economic Development signifies "advancement should happen without harming the climate, and improvement in the present ought not bargain with the necessities of people in the future."

Asset Planning

In India, there are a few districts which can be viewed as independent as far as the accessibility of assets and there are a few areas which have intense deficiency of some fundamental assets. This calls for adjusted asset arranging at the public, state, local and neighborhood levels.

Asset Planning in India

Asset arranging is a perplexing cycle which includes:

(I) Identification and stock of assets over the locales of the nation. This includes studying, planning and subjective and quantitative assessment and estimation of the assets.

(ii) Evolving an arranging structure supplied with fitting innovation, ability and institutional set ready for executing asset advancement plans.

(iii) Matching the asset advancement plans with by and large public improvement plans.

Assets can add to improvement just when they are joined by fitting innovative turn of events and institutional changes. India has put forth purposeful attempts towards accomplishing the objectives of asset arranging, directly from the First Five Year Plan dispatched after Independence.

To conquer nonsensical utilization and over-use of assets, asset protection at different levels is significant.

Land Resources

Land is a characteristic asset of most extreme significance. It underpins regular vegetation, natural life, human life, financial exercises, transport and correspondence frameworks. India has land under an assortment of alleviation highlights, specifically; mountains, levels, fields and islands as demonstrated as follows:

Land Resources

Land Utilization

Land assets are utilized for the accompanying purposes:

Woodlands

Land not accessible for development

a) Barren and no man's land

b) Land put to non-agrarian employments

Neglected terrains

Other crude grounds (barring decrepit land)

Net planted zone

Land Use Pattern in India

The utilization of land is resolved

Physical components, for example, geography, atmosphere, soil types

Human variables, for example, populace thickness, innovative capacity and culture and customs and so forth.

The information underneath speaks to the land use design in India.

Land Use Pattern in India

Squander land is the land put to other non-farming uses which incorporate rough, dry and desert territories, streets, railroads, industry and so on. Nonstop utilization of land over a significant stretch of time without taking suitable measures to preserve and oversee it, has brought about land corruption.

Land Degradation and Conservation Measures

Human exercises, for example, deforestation, overgrazing, mining and quarrying have contributed essentially to land corruption. Mining destinations leave profound scars and hints of over-troubling the land. Lately, modern effluents as waste have become a significant wellspring of land and water contamination in numerous pieces of the nation.

A portion of the routes through which we can take care of the issues of land corruption are:

Afforestation and legitimate administration of touching.

Planting of safe house belts of plants.

Adjustment of sand hills by developing prickly hedges.

Legitimate administration of waste grounds.

Control of mining exercises.

Legitimate release and removal of modern effluents and squanders after treatment.

[ecompaniesusa]

Choose a business structure

The business structure you choose influences everything from day-to-day operations, to taxes, to how much of your personal assets are at risk. You should choose a business structure that gives you the right balance of legal protections and benefits.

Your business structure affects how much you pay in taxes, your ability to raise money, the paperwork you need to file, and your personal liability.

You’ll need to choose a business structure before you register your business with the state. Most businesses will also need to get a tax ID number and file for the appropriate licenses and permits.

Choose carefully. While you may convert to a different business structure in the future, there may be restrictions based on your location. This could also result in tax consequences and unintended dissolution, among other complications.

Sole proprietorship

A sole proprietorship is easy to form and gives you complete control of your business. You’re automatically considered to be a sole proprietorship if you do business activities but don’t register as any other kind of business.

Sole proprietorships do not produce a separate business entity. This means your business assets and liabilities are not separate from your personal assets and liabilities. You can be held personally liable for the debts and obligations of the business. Sole proprietors are still able to get a trade name. It can also be hard to raise money because you can’t sell stock, and banks are hesitant to lend to sole proprietorships.

Sole proprietorships can be a good choice for low-risk businesses and owners who want to test their business idea before forming a more formal business.

Partnership

Partnerships are the simplest structure for two or more people to own a business together. There are two common kinds of partnerships: limited partnerships (LP) and limited liability partnerships (LLP).

Limited partnerships have only one general partner with unlimited liability, and all other partners have limited liability. The partners with limited liability also tend to have limited control over the company, which is documented in a partnership agreement. Profits are passed through to personal tax returns, and the general partner — the partner without limited liability — must also pay self-employment taxes.

Limited liability partnerships are similar to limited partnerships, but give limited liability to every owner. An LLP protects each partner from debts against the partnership, they won’t be responsible for the actions of other partners.

Partnerships can be a good choice for businesses with multiple owners, professional groups (like attorneys), and groups who want to test their business idea before forming a more formal business.

Limited liability company (LLC)

An LLC lets you take advantage of the benefits of both the corporation and partnership business structures.

LLCs protect you from personal liability in most instances, your personal assets — like your vehicle, house, and savings accounts — won’t be at risk in case your LLC faces bankruptcy or lawsuits.

Profits and losses can get passed through to your personal income without facing corporate taxes. However, members of an LLC are considered self-employed and must pay self-employment tax contributions towards Medicare and Social Security.

LLCs can have a limited life in many states. When a member joins or leaves an LLC, some states may require the LLC to be dissolved and re-formed with new membership — unless there’s already an agreement in place within the LLC for buying, selling, and transferring ownership.

LLCs can be a good choice for medium- or higher-risk businesses, owners with significant personal assets they want to be protected, and owners who want to pay a lower tax rate than they would with a corporation.

Corporation

C corp A corporation, sometimes called a C corp, is a legal entity that’s separate from its owners. Corporations can make a profit, be taxed, and can be held legally liable.

Corporations offer the strongest protection to its owners from personal liability, but the cost to form a corporation is higher than other structures. Corporations also require more extensive record-keeping, operational processes, and reporting.

Unlike sole proprietors, partnerships, and LLCs, corporations pay income tax on their profits. In some cases, corporate profits are taxed twice — first, when the company makes a profit, and again when dividends are paid to shareholders on their personal tax returns.

Corporations have a completely independent life separate from its shareholders. If a shareholder leaves the company or sells his or her shares, the C corp can continue doing business relatively undisturbed.

Corporations have an advantage when it comes to raising capital because they can raise funds through the sale of stock, which can also be a benefit in attracting employees.

Corporations can be a good choice for medium- or higher-risk businesses, businesses that need to raise money, and businesses that plan to “go public” or eventually be sold.

S corp An S corporation, sometimes called an S corp, is a special type of corporation that’s designed to avoid the double taxation drawback of regular C corps. S corps allow profits, and some losses, to be passed through directly to owners’ personal income without ever being subject to corporate tax rates.

Not all states tax S corps equally, but most recognize them the same way the federal government does and taxes the shareholders accordingly. Some states tax S corps on profits above a specified limit and other states don’t recognize the S corp election at all, simply treating the business as a C corp.

S corps must file with the IRS to get S corp status, a different process from registering with their state.

There are special limits on S corps. S corps can’t have more than 100 shareholders, and all shareholders must be U.S. citizens. You’ll still have to follow strict filing and operational processes of a C corp.

S corps also have an independent life, just like C corps. If a shareholder leaves the company or sells his or her shares, the S corp can continue doing business relatively undisturbed.

S corps can be a good choice for a business that would otherwise be a C corp, but meet the criteria to file as an S corp.

B corp A benefit corporation, sometimes called a B Corp, is a for-profit corporation recognized a majority of U.S. states. B Corps are different from C corps in purpose, accountability, and transparency, but aren’t different in how they’re taxed.

B Corps are driven by both mission and profit. Shareholders hold the company accountable to produce some sort of public benefit in addition to a financial profit. Some states require B corps to submit annual benefit reports that demonstrate their contribution to the public good.

There are several third-party B Corp certification services, but none are required for a company to be legally considered a B Corp in a state where the legal status is available.

Close corporation Close corporations resemble B corps but have a less traditional corporate structure. These shed many formalities that typically govern corporations and apply to smaller companies.

State rules vary, but shares are usually barred from public trading. Close corporations can be run by a small group of shareholders without a board of directors.

Nonprofit Corporation

Nonprofit corporations are organized to do charity, education, religious, literary, or scientific work. Because their work benefits the public, nonprofits can receive tax-exempt status, meaning they don’t pay state or federal taxes income taxes on any profits it makes.

Nonprofits must file with the IRS to get tax exemption, a different process from registering with their state.

Nonprofit corporations need to follow organizational rules very similar to a regular C corp. They also need to follow special rules about what they do with any profits they earn. For example, they can’t distribute profits to members or political campaigns.

Nonprofits are often called 501(c)(3) corporations — a reference to the section of the Internal Revenue Code that is most commonly used to grant tax-exempt status.

Cooperative A cooperative is a business or organization owned by and operated for the benefit of those using its services. Profits and earnings generated by the cooperative are distributed among the members, also known as user-owners. Typically, an elected board of directors and officers run the cooperative while regular members have the voting power to control the direction of the cooperative. Members can become part of the cooperative by purchasing shares, though the amount of shares they hold does not affect the weight of their vote.

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[drthasanjohnson]

“Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.” ― Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

I have known pissed off Black men all my life. The permanent scowl I saw them wear taught me much, but it wasn’t until young adulthood that I found out the plethora of reasons why they–no, we–wore it. In a short period of time between the 1960s and 1970s, the following policies became ensconced in law, dramatically changing reality for Black males nationally.

Female-centered Welfare (eg. “Man in the House” Rule),

Female-centered Family Court policy (eg. No Fault divorce)

Female-centered Birth control,

Female-centered Title IX,

Female-centered need-based financial aid (eg. Pell Grants),

Black Female-centered Affirmative Action hiring,

Black Female-centered media

These practices accomplished at least two things that impacted Black male/female relations: First, it created what would become a multi-generational sense of entitlement among many Black women who soon forgot that such allowances allowed them opportunities Black men did not get. This lead to a sense that Black men were failures who could not “keep up” with Black women’s state-supported academic and employment accomplishments, buoyed by a new media industry that centered Black women while it simultaneously discredited Black men as stereotypical deadbeat dads, criminals, abusers, and rapists. In other words, this media entrenched the misandrist notion that Black women were fundamentally better than their men, a notion that soon became accepted-wisdom—even in the mainstream.

Secondly, it created the conditions that spawned an uncoordinated, silent protest among many Black men whose decision-making capacity in families was reduced and made subject to women’s fancies. Hence, alongside anti-Black male hyper-incarceration, the War on Drugs & intra-racial homicide, post de-industrial mass unemployment, and a diminished kindergarten-through-graduate-school education due to a female-administered (gynocentric) pedagogy, Black men found themselves prisoner to their own biology in ways women were newly liberated from in the 1960s. Even contemporarily, if a man has an unwanted impregnation, people suggest he should’ve “kept it in his pants,” despite the fact that women have 5 major birth control options in about 30 different forms (hormonal methods, barrier methods, intra-uterine devices, natural methods, and emergency contraception) that apply before, during, and after the sex act seems irrelevant to most. Meanwhile, what do men have? Condoms, vasectomies, and abstinence. In 2018. Yes, you read that right.

Especially after the sexual revolution, (poor) Black men found themselves prisoners to families they may not have even wanted, only to be described by women as deadbeats (especially by those they may not have wanted to become lifelong partners with). But how many have seen this for what it was? A silent protest. The new political climate demanded new relationship-strategies for a relatively poor population of men, as many of these policies were designed for wealth(ier) white men, not a population impoverished and blocked from wealth since slavery. Yet to many women, these practices were viewed as “juvenile” or “fearful of commitment,” but rarely as a response to a new social context that often proved devastating to Black men’s quality of life. Besides, how do you tell a child that you never wanted them in the first place, the mother knew this before sex, and although still expected to be a father against his will, he had other dreams? (Here, expectations that he “step up” hearken back to the era of men being coerced into marriages “shotgun” style.) Yet, as a grown man who has had women abort children I wanted while others threatened pregnancies I did not want, I cannot help but ask: how might this scenario have played out differently had there been a male birth control pill the same time women got such options?

Women were given sole-reproductive control over the production of family and men were removed from the decision-making process. There was no comparable birth control for men, thus leaving them vulnerable to both women and their own natural drive to inseminate, while liberating women from being subject to their biology and empowering her biological impulse to reproduce and nest, able to garner male support even when against his will.

Child support alone became a disastrous industry that bankrupted and incarcerated many poor Black men, punishing them for inter-generational poverty. For example, as Kirk E. Harris of The Guardian notes the story of James:

“Four years ago the state of Illinois suspended the driver’s license of James (not his real name) for failing to fully meet his child support obligations, which he was not earning enough to pay. Now, unable to drive to work, he lost his full-time welding job. He found a lower-paid job he could reach using Chicago’s patchy suburban public transport system, which makes commuting difficult for people in some of the city’s economically isolated and racially segregated communities.

Today, James’ wages are still insufficient to pay off his mounting arrears, so he remains barred from driving. Ironically, his lack of driving privileges makes it impossible for him to cast a net for a better-paying job that would allow him to meet these payments. That paradox illustrates the regressive, counterproductive policies I have encountered during two decades of working with low-income black fathers in Chicago. The vast majority of these men desperately want to be good fathers, but the system seems to punish them for even trying.”

These practices severely cripple Black men so that some risk their lives trying to escape it, as can be seen in the case of the slain Walter Scott. As Collier Meyerson observes in her article, “How Our Racist Child Support Laws Hurt Poor, Black Fathers the Most,”

“All noncustodial parents, the overwhelming majority of whom are men, are legally obligated to pay child support, but for those who are poor, it simply compounds their poverty. The racial wage gap shows that white men get paid an average of $21 dollars an hour while black men get paid an average of $15 an hour. Child support data isn’t collected by race, but given black men’s disadvantage in the workplace, it’s safe to presume they also disproportionately owe child support when they cannot afford it.

“Twenty percent of the people in this system shouldn’t be in there because they’re too poor,” says David J. Pate, an associate professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. “Those $10,000 or even $20,000 earners.” The government, according to Pate, is owed $115 billion in child support, but 70% of that money is owed by Americans who make less than $10,000 a year.”

Not quite a movement in the manner we’re accustomed (think Women’s Lib), Black men’s movement was a “vote with their feet” to leave formal socially-approved forms of relationships. Even men not incarcerated, unemployed, or “deadbeats” found themselves outside of the family for reasons they could not always control. After all, 70% of divorces are initiated by women, and around 70% of Black children are born to unwed mothers. Black men were/are socially-expected to meet unrealistic standards they often could not keep up with while being made subject to a newly formed, state-sanctioned, female-based patriarchy (gynarchy) that allowed child-bearing wives carte-blanche powers to exact revenge-based financial ruin at will… Some women used other forms of state-sanctioned anger, keeping their children away from Black fathers while using family courts to secure resources. To be clear, I do not argue that this scenario was always the case, merely to say there were few checks in place to prevent such acts of revenge from keeping fathers and children apart. And fathers getting custody over mothers is still a relatively unheard of endeavor.

Yet despite such a shift in African Americanity, many men proved that Black men were the most progressive men as fathers, lovers, and husbands. In fact, it could be argued that such changes only enhanced Black men’s progressiveness regarding gender roles in relationships and families because Black men implicitly understood alienation and oppression. Furthermore, it could also be argued that since the 1970s, becoming a stepfather to the biological children of your partner became the definition of being a “good Black man.”

As a child, this notion of “good man” was so ingrained in me that I could never imagine being married to a woman that did not already have children. 

“Debunking the Most Pervasive Myth About Black Fatherhood” By German Lopez

Nevertheless, journalist German Lopez states in his article, “Debunking the Most Pervasive Myth About Black Fatherhood,”

“Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that showed 71.5 percent of black, non-Hispanic children in 2013 were born to unmarried women, compared with 29.3 percent of white, non-Hispanic children.”

“But as Josh Levs pointed out in his new book All In, 2.5 million of 4.2 million black fathers — or about 59.5 percent — live with their children. Levs’s numbers suggest that it’s not true, as the CDC figures suggests, that 71.5 percent of black dads are absent from their homes — but rather that many of them are simply unmarried.”

“And when black fathers do live with their children, they’re just as, if not more, likely to be involved in their kids’ everyday lives. Blow cited CDC data that showed black fathers are more likely than their white and Hispanic counterparts to feed, eat with, bathe, diaper, dress, play with, and read to their children on a daily basis.”

Still, whether Black men stayed with their families, left them, or became fathers to children that were not theirs, each was responding to–and grappling with–conditions structurally created, forcing them to start from precarious contexts to begin with. But what is my main point? Simple. Black men are human. And the most attacked and underdeveloped group in America. Yet despite this they find ways to redemptively serve families despite being overlooked while doing so and their protest was misframed as abandonment. Antonio Moore might best describe the alternative if people do not start to listen to Black males…

Yvette Carnell: “What happens if we don’t get better? What happens if people just keep making these erroneous assessments and agreeing with erroneous data and saying this is ok? What happens?”

Antonio Moore: “Let me be honest…I think eventually Black men are going to realize it and turn on everybody. Because what the system is built on is Black men not knowing that they live in a different life than everybody—including Black women. They’re living a life where they’re unemployed but expected to buy dates…they’re supposed to protect and provide like a man…they’re put in jail at rates we’ve never seen before. I was talking to an attorney they said that Black men should get together and claim refugee status with another country just to make a…political point that nobody cares.

…This chart came as a result of me realizing nobody had framed this thing according to gender. Which makes no sense (nobody…not [even] the DOJ), because once you frame it against gender then Black men realize [that] this is some horrible shit…and they might just like raise up on everybody. And when I say “raise up” I’m not talking about literally rioting in the street, I’m talking about like becoming real despondent. Become like really like “I’m not fucking with nothing…no marriage, no nothing, I’m out. Don’ nobody care, ain’t nobody trading nothing with me.” (Breaking Brown @ approximately 1hr 06min; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxZWLnFRGFY)

“Why Was Black Generation X Fatherless?: A Brief Statement On Why Many Black Men “Left” The Family In The 1970s” by T. Hasan Johnson, Ph.D. “Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day.

[investmart007]

WASHINGTON | Few teeth in Trump's prescription to reduce drug prices

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/xTyq7N

WASHINGTON | Few teeth in Trump's prescription to reduce drug prices

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s long-promised plan to bring down drug prices, unveiled Friday, would mostly spare the pharmaceutical industry he previously accused of “getting away with murder.” Instead he focuses on private competition and more openness to reduce America’s prescription pain.

In Rose Garden remarks at the White House, Trump called his plan the “most sweeping action in history to lower the price of prescription drugs for the American people.” But it does not include his campaign pledge to use the massive buying power of the government’s Medicare program to directly negotiate lower prices for seniors.

That idea has long been supported by Democrats but is a non-starter for drugmakers and most Republicans in Congress.

Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas dismissed Trump’s plan as “a sugar-coated nothing pill.”

The administration will pursue a raft of old and new measures intended to improve competition and transparency in the notoriously complex drug pricing system. But most of the measures could take months or years to implement, and none would stop drugmakers from setting sky-high initial prices.

“There are some things in this set of proposals that can move us in the direction of lower prices for some people,” said David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs. “At the same time it, is not clear at all how they are going to lower list prices.”

Drugmakers generally can charge as much as the market will bear because the U.S. government doesn’t regulate medicine prices, unlike most other developed countries.

Trump’s list of 50 proposals, dubbed American Patients First, includes:

— A potential requirement for drugmakers to disclose the cost of their medicines in television advertisements.

— Banning a pharmacist “gag rule,” which prevents druggists from telling customers when they can save money by paying cash instead of using their insurance.

— Speeding up the approval process for over-the-counter medications so people can buy more drugs without prescriptions.

— Reconsidering how Medicare pays for some high-priced drugs administered at doctors’ offices.

Those ideas avoid a direct confrontation with the powerful pharmaceutical lobby, but they may also underwhelm Americans seeking relief from escalating prescription costs.

Democrats pounced on Trump for not pursuing direct Medicare negotiations, an idea championed before reaching the White House.

“This weak plan abandons the millions of hard-working families struggling with the crisis of surging drug prices,” said Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, in a statement.

Pharmaceutical investors and analysts expressed relief after the announcement, and shares of most top drugmakers rose Friday afternoon, including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly.

“Trump had a choice today: to seek disruptive fundamental reform or to embrace more incremental steps,” wrote Terry Haines, a financial analyst, in an investment note. “Trump chose the incremental over the disruptive.”

Many parts of the plan were previously proposed in the president’s budget proposal sent to Congress, including providing free generic drugs to low-income seniors and sharing rebates from drugmakers with Medicare patients.

A majority of Americans say passing laws to bring down prescription drug prices should be a top priority for Trump and Congress, according to recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

As a candidate, Trump railed against the pharmaceutical industry.

But as president he has shied away from major changes and has staffed his administration with appointees who have deep ties to the industry. They include Health Secretary Alex Azar, a former top executive at Eli Lilly and Co., who joined Trump for Friday’s announcement.

Azar and other Trump officials have hinted for weeks that the plan would, in part, “dismantle” the convoluted system of rebates between drugmakers and the health care middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers, which negotiate price concessions for insurers, employers and other large customers.

Trump called out those companies in his speech: “Our plan will end the dishonest double-dealing that allows the middleman to pocket rebates and discounts that should be passed onto consumers and patients,” Trump said.

Azar later told reporters that the administration would “seek input” on doing away with drug rebates in the Medicare system to encourage more direct discounts. He gave no timeframe for more concrete steps.

“It took decades to erect this very complex, interwoven system,” Azar said in a briefing following the speech. “I don’t want to overpromise that somehow by Monday there’s going to be a radical change, but there’s a deep commitment to structural change.”

Public outrage over drug costs has been growing for years as Americans face pricing pressure from multiple sources: New medicines for life-threatening diseases often launch with prices exceeding $100,000 per year. And older drugs for common ailments like diabetes and asthma routinely see price hikes around 10 percent annually. Meanwhile Americans are paying more at the pharmacy counter due to health insurance plans that require them to shoulder more of their prescription costs.

America has the highest drug prices in the world.

The U.S. spent $1,162 per person on prescription drugs in 2015, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s more than twice the $497 per person spent in the United Kingdom, which has a nationalized health care system.

Trump’s speech singled out foreign governments that “extort unreasonably low prices from U.S. drugmakers” using price controls and said U.S. trade representatives would prioritize the issue in trade deals.

But experts are skeptical the U.S. can pressure foreign governments to pay more for drugs.

“It’s hard to know why Germany or France of Australia would agree to something like that,” said Professor Jack Hoadley of Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute.

In the U.S., Medicare is the largest purchaser of prescription drugs, covering 60 million seniors and Americans with disabilities, but it is barred by law from directly negotiating lower prices with drugmakers.

Allowing Medicare to negotiate prices is unacceptable to the powerful drug lobby, which has spent tens of millions of dollars since Trump’s inauguration to influence the Washington conversation around drug prices, including a high-profile TV advertising campaign portraying its scientists as medical trailblazers.

The drug industry’s top lobbying arm, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, spent nearly $26 million to sway federal decision makers last year, according to records tallied by Center for Responsive Politics. The annual total was a record for the group.

The group’s chief executive, Stephen Ubl, said in a statement that some Trump proposals could help patients afford their medicines, but “others would disrupt coverage and limit patients’ access to innovative treatments.”

By MATTHEW PERRONE and JILL COLVIN By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (U.S)

[citiesandtowns]

Sugar Beach and its ‘umbrellas’ have been criticized as extravagant; but in fact the park sets an example.

On Unwin Avenue in Toronto's port lands, the ground looks like a blank canvas: it's largely a scrubland of asphalt and sumacs, punctuated by a power plant. The skyline of downtown shimmers like a mirage, but it's just four kilometres away.

From here, it's clear why governments see this area of the waterfront as ripe for development, and why the public agency Waterfront Toronto was created in 2001 to make that happen. But as the agency's CEO John Campbell explains, it's not as simple as it looks. "All the land south of Front Street is landfill," said Mr. Campbell in an interview this week. "It's all brownfield" – former industrial land, often contaminated – "and it shifts. The costs of building down here are exorbitantly high. That's why nothing much has happened here for so long."

Yet Waterfront Toronto is responsible for revitalizing about 2,000 acres of this waterfront land, an area roughly equal to the entire downtown core, while reporting to three levels of government.

Seen as a whole, this is the biggest project of its kind in the world. So far, the agency has spent nearly $1.5-billion on infrastructure, cleaning polluted soil, and creating new parks and places of extremely high design quality. It has brought in profitable and attractive private development with a serious green- building agenda.

And it has been largely free of controversy – until this month, when it faced claims of overspending from Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong and Mayor Rob Ford, and the mayor called for Mr. Campbell's resignation. These attacks come just as it seeks $1.65-billion in funding for the next 10 years of its work.

Those deciding whether or not it gets that vote of confidence need to look at its record. Working quietly, the agency has become the great success story of Toronto urbanism in the 21st century.

Because the agency was created by all three levels of government, it has been able to pursue its long-term plan, which will take at least 25 years to complete, without being derailed by changes of government. The mayor, who seems to have forgotten that he was appointed to Waterfront Toronto's board, can't force Mr. Campbell out; Doug Ford couldn't overrule years of planning with his ill-conceived pitch for a Ferris wheel and shopping mall.

The agency says that its first $1.26-billion in spending generated $622-million in direct revenue to government, plus $838-million in revenues from the development projects it has made possible. "It's very close to break-even, plus much more in spinoffs already," Mr. Campbell argues.

So far, the agency is doing large-scale development the right way. It is creating a series of cohesive new neighbourhoods, extending from Jarvis Street through the port lands, mixing public space, public buildings, and profitable private housing with a component of affordable rentals to create a real community.

The agency takes a long-term approach that sees both beauty and return on investment in building a 21st-century cityscape: vibrant day and night, pedestrian-friendly and focused on the street, and with broadband to support employment and entrepreneurship in tech and related fields. The goal is what Mr. Campbell calls "a pedestrian, high-quality, beautiful environment that has a quality of place that's second to none."

Urban beauty is a tool of economic development. "Talent and capital are mobile," Mr. Campbell says. Keeping them here – attracting educated, entrepreneurial people who increasingly want to be in places that feel like cities – is the goal. Mr. Campbell, a career real estate executive who oversaw the completion of the BCE Place complex in the early 1990s, deeply understands the cultural shift that is drawing some businesses away from Bay Street towers toward hipper precincts. This insight guides waterfront development. "It's about making the city's quality of life and quality of place make us competitive in the long run," he says.

"It's an economic long game."

Waterfront Toronto seems caught off-guard by the recent political attacks, particularly Mr. Campbell – a jovial man who's as lean as a plank and seems boyishly enthusiastic about the agency's mission. He is too proper a civil servant to argue with the mayor, but also a bit flummoxed. "If you ask my staff, I'm very tight-fisted when it comes to expenses and such," he says. "It's the Scottish blood in me."

To execute its vision, the agency has started with public space: 23 new or improved parks. Following the wisdom that's driven port lands redevelopments across Europe and the Americas, the agency understands that creating a sense of place is crucial in making new neighbourhoods. They've used design competitions to hire some of the best landscape architects in the world to do this.

Take Sugar Beach. The two-acre park opened in 2010 at the foot of Jarvis Street, the point where the busy central waterfront starts to dissolve into a terra incognita of light industry and parking lots.

The park, designed by Montreal's Claude Cormier and Associates, is a showcase, and isn't a "beach" in any real sense; it is a public square for a very dense neighbourhood that is coming into being. The office building next door houses radio station The Edge; when they host in-studio performances, audiences of up to 1,000 spill out onto Sugar Beach's paved plaza. Mounds of granite, transported from a Quebec hillside, provide a lunchtime perch for office workers and students from the George Brown health campus that's opened one building down; condo-dwellers from the St. Lawrence neighbourhood now come here to sunbathe or take their toddlers to the splash pad.

A certain amount of hardiness and rigour, not to mention quality of place, was required. These are among Waterfront Toronto's core principles."We've got to get this right," says Mr. Campbell. "It's a once-in-100-years opportunity; you can't jerry-rig it. We have to make sure that the quality is there, and it's something we're all proud of."

Cormier's landscape architecture firm won a design competition; changed their design following rigorous feedback from the public and the competition's judges; and then the construction of the project went out for competitive bidding.

For this and for each of Waterfront Toronto's capital projects, the agency must submit a formal application for funds that is vetted by the city, province and federal governments. That vetting process, Mr. Campbell says, has taken an average of six months for each project. "This idea that we don't have oversight – we have more oversight than you can shake a stick at," he says.

And the results in the case of Sugar Beach are extremely strong. The park functions well as public space and also as an Instagram-able landmark. The sugary white sand is a welcome place to sunbathe, against the backdrop of a cargo ship parked at the Redpath Sugar plant just across the water. It meets the granite mounds, which Claude Cormier calls "rock candy," to form a playful tableau.

And those beach "umbrellas," now notorious after Mr. Minnan-Wong's attack on their price tag of $11,565 each, are solid. They are tough fiberglass on a stainless-steel structure; each stands on a concrete base about three metres square. In its shaft, each holds an LED light fixture, weatherproof and controllable. This is not lawn furniture. It's infrastructure, built to survive wild crowds and January winds and stand up for a thousand selfies.

The need for all this will be clear when the neighbourhood is fully built out, which is happening rapidly. Next door, Waterfront Toronto is building a Waterfront Innovation Centre in two buildings adjacent to the park, to house tech companies and draw on the ultra-high-speed broadband Internet service that they have brought into the area.

Workers and others will be able to live nearby: developers Hines and Tridel have a 363-unit building under construction next door, and a second phase is coming. They'll be part of a well-planned neighbourhood that includes small, pedestrian-friendly streets lined with retail, designed to mitigate the sense of corporate sameness that comes with all large development projects.

That is an important concern, and WT is right to worry about it: The agency's plan is to build 40,000 residential units, which will house an estimated 115,000 people.

This whole area of the city is changing almost by the hour. Right across the street from Sugar Beach is the 2.8-acre site of The Guvernment nightclub; it's owned by developers Daniels, who are planning a mixed-use development that might include four separate buildings. This is not a Waterfront Toronto project, but it is subject to a city design review panel – through which new buildings get critiqued by a group of top design professionals.

And a sophisticated context has been set by the parks, the excellent office and college buildings, by Diamond Schmitt and KPMB, and the nearby condos currently under construction – including the River City project a few blocks away, by Montreal architects Saucier and Perrotte, a complex of what are the most adventurous and handsome residential buildings in the city. Their developers, Urban Capital, won the right to build here after submitting a competitive bid to WT. And while the agency picked their proposal based on a mix of criteria including design quality, it also included the highest financial return for the agency and governments. That has happened, says Mr. Campbell, with each of the agency's condo deals so far. "We set the bar high," he says. "Developers see that there's room here for a high-quality product. We all win."

For many Torontonians, that sounds too good to be true. For 200 years the waterfront has been a place where grand dreams go to drown. The idea that a government agency is accomplishing something here, and doing it right, is hard to imagine. But it's true. To show off the vision, Mr. Campbell took me to the new park, Corktown Common, at the foot of River Street, which opened officially this month. I was there a few times last year, and the park looked great. This week it looked even better: lushly green, the playgrounds full, a new artificial wetland humming with life, and the skyline in front filling in nicely. It suggests what the port lands could look like in a generation. It's a vision of Toronto's future going surprisingly right.

[lunaciclo]

Men or mice: is masculinity in crisis?

We are in the midst of a renewed discussion about masculinity in crisis. The latest contribution comes from Iain Duncan Smith, who this week suggested at a Tory Conference fringe event that unmarried men from poorer backgrounds are prone to become “dysfunctional” human beings who can be problematic for society. His words mirror other recent descriptions of masculinity as “toxic”, “broken” and, especially, “in crisis”.

The rise of this purported crisis debate is indicative of the fact we are living in a time of significant social change. Because so many of the historical constructions of society are fundamentally patriarchal, when those ossified structures are loosened – whether by a movement (first- and second-wave feminism, for example) or circumstance (de-industrialisation, financial crisis, or the fracturing of political predictabilities) – then any one-size conception of masculinity buried within them is thrown into the open.

A Natural by Ross Raisin review – brave portrait of a gay footballer

This subtle story of a bullied sportsman in denial about his sexuality is a winner Read more

Football, with its rigid and simplified codes of accepted behaviour, can provide a very clear lens for viewing the relationship between what a man is expected to be in a particular world, and what can become of a man who does not meet those expectations – both inside the squad, and on the terraces.

And nowhere is the triangular relationship between football, place and hard-clung hegemonic ideals more pronounced than in the post-industrial heartlands of the north: Glasgow, Liverpool and the north-east. Which, statistically, are the areas where men are markedly “in crisis”.

The most recent ONS figures show the north-east has the highest avoidable mortality rate for males in England. Suicide, the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK, has its second highest rate in the region – a fact that, for many commentators, bears some relation to statistics on joblessness and employment precarity. The north-east had the joint-lowest average actual weekly hours of work by men during the last tax year.

Throughout history, a common instigator of the masculinity-in-crisis conversation has been the shifting of cultural constructions of the workplace – and it was one such fretful period that gave rise to the institution of football in the first place. As Victorian men moved from the fields into factories, so grew a fear that their sons, now spending more time at home with their mothers, were at risk of becoming feminised, or “inverted” (the Freudian term for homosexual).

Organised sport, with its emphasis on male bonding and toughness, was a concerted work of remasculinisation. Over time, as football clubs gained popularity, that masculine paradigm remained in place, bolted on to the parallel institutions of heavy industry that grew alongside the sport.

For a great many men, there is still a safety in the familiarity of that structure. The industry may be gone, but the way of life – the kind of man – it embodies still echoes out from every empty shipyard and derelict factory. Picking apart the threads of its masculine tradition can, to some, feel tantamount to the denigration of a people’s history. Take away the external edifice to expose the inner core of any man with a fixed belief system – one that might traditionally promote hardness over shyness, the repudiation of emotional expression – and what is often revealed is an anxiety of relevance.

The Men’s Voices Project gives an absorbing insight into this anxiety. It is a sound exhibition curated from dozens of interviews with men and boys in the north-east – from Deerbolt Young Offenders Institution, Barnardo’s Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programme and The Woodlands Pupil Referral Unit – in which we can hear, as the undercurrent to many of the conversations, the issue of control.

One of the notable refrains is an unease, particularly of older men, at the so-called feminisation of the workplace, as clerical and service industries have taken the place of manufacturing labour. Even though these newer industries are themselves mostly insecure forms of employment, a private insecurity repeatedly shows itself at the idea of a man not being the breadwinner:

“If my missus was … the sole provider, I think there’d be a lot of friction in the house, because my manliness would be gone… I would feel really angry at her, and at myself. But probably at myself more.”

To some men, the balance of power has reversed and, in the words of another interviewee: “It’s the man that needs the equal rights, not the woman. It’s the man that’s getting put out.”

‘Lost sense of masculinity’

The loss of industry over the last half century has taken with it a vital signifier of identity for many men. And in their reconstruction of who they are, their football club is sometimes the last remaining bastion.

There are men in the stands at Sunderland, Newcastle and Middlesbrough, as there are throughout the north, who used to work in factories, shipyards, steelworks. It is natural enough that their sons and grandsons beside them might feel a connection to that heritage, steeped as it is into the culture of match day – from the names of the pubs they drink in before the game to the stories at the bar of times gone by, that lock together into a framework of belonging.

But thinking of that framework as inviolable is problematic. For one thing, the match day environment is, slowly but surely, moving with the times. As Simon Bolton, of the Middlesbrough Official Supporters Club, puts it: “If you want to mix purely with other men and feel that you’re in an environment of male dominance, forget going to a match at the Riverside … Boro fans come in all ages, young and old, and all genders. If the men of today want to use football as a way of regaining any lost sense of masculinity, they’d best look elsewhere.”

Furthermore, a preconceived identity can be a burden as much as it can be a celebration. The image of the Newcastle supporter, in particular, can be a trying one to live up to. I spoke to one fan whose father worked as an oil rig electrician, and whose grandfather was a foreman joiner at the Swan Hunter shipyard. Dan, however, “can’t wire a plug”. He works in new media, and moved away from the city two decades ago. His own sense of belonging comes, now, from the outside, and he has an honest appraisal of the typecast of a Newcastle supporter:

“I’ve always felt it became a parody of itself. There’s a real media perception of what Geordie men are like, that becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s a kernel – it comes from reality – but the perception of it means that you actually live up to that stereotype. It’s an inherited way of behaving.”

When I asked him what that way of behaving is, he told me a statistic about champagne drinking: that Newcastle has the highest rate of champagne consumption per capita outside of London. “Hedonistic,” he says, “is an apt word for the Geordie man.”

Hedonism, certainly, is associated with the popular perception of the city, in a way that, in the other post-industrialised urban centres of the region, it is not. And hedonism as an identity, a stereotype, can be a difficult cross to bear too.

‘Love the lunatic’

Dan grew up in Whickham, the town next to Dunstan, birthplace of the ultimate Geordie self-fulfilling prophecy. Paul Gascoigne was the son of a hod-carrier father and a mother who worked in a chip shop and as a cleaner. He came from a background of working-class masculinity – and signed as an apprentice for Newcastle with the purpose of taking on the role of family breadwinner.

From this lineage of Geordie Men, as the cultural fabric of the area began to change, the persona of “Gazza” led the way for a new kind of post-industrial masculine identity. He was every inch a Geordie, but one that came to represent the hedonistic, hard-drinking party spirit that started to brand Newcastle in the nineties. He was daft as a brush, drunk; yet limitless, messianic.

The constraints of such an act, however, can have the consequence that, once the structure around that life falls away, so too can the individual attached to it. Gascoigne’s struggles, pre- and post-retirement, with alcohol, mental illness, bankruptcy, gambling and bulimia have been lengthily documented. His ex-wife has written about the years of domestic abuse he subjected her to. He has been prosecuted for assault and, more recently, racist abuse.

But throughout his psychological and physical deterioration, when what he has clearly needed is a supported departure from his old way of living, it is notable that the barometer of his health has habitually been measured, publicly, not by signs of a new Gascoigne, but by applauding any reversion to the man he used to be ...

“Great to see Gazza back on form” ... “Great to see Gazza in such sparkling form. Love the lunatic.” (Piers Morgan and Gary Lineker tweets after Gascoigne’s appearance on the Fletch and Sav show, 2015)

It is not only Paul Gascoigne who has found himself emotionally and socially hamstrung by that tagline: “love the lunatic”. The expectation to behave in a prescribed way (which, pertinently, for Gascoigne does involve showing emotion) brings us back to the anxiety of relevance that many men feel.

A recent book about Tyneside, Akenside Syndrome: Scratching the Surface of Geordie Identity by Joe Sharkey, describes an alienation felt by those men of the area who are not in tune with accepted codes of masculinity. The author outlines “four pillars” of Geordie identity – class, accent, drink, football – to which the Geordie male is supposed to conform. There is a pressure to be that person which comes from the outside, as Dan describes, and also from within.

Andrew Hankinson, the author of a brilliant, bruising narrative about the Tyneside murderer Raoul Moat, You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat) – a story that Gascoigne has a brief, bizarre connection to, as he tried to bring a chicken and a fishing rod to Moat during the police stand-off – explained to me his own feelings of Akenside Syndrome:

“There’s an unreconstructed nature to masculinity in the north-east and I don’t come up to scratch: I don’t have a Geordie accent, I’m not into football, I don’t go out on the piss on Friday nights, I do childcare ... I once had a ticket inspector on the metro ask me why I was looking after my kids on a weekday.”

Hankinson ascribes a similar feeling of not fitting in to Moat himself: “He hardly drank, he didn’t like football. People assume he was trying to overcome a crisis of masculinity by working out and developing big muscles and being violent, but I actually think his crisis of masculinity was as evident in what he said and wrote about money.” According to Hankinson, “he regarded an expensive car and big house as status symbols of masculinity, but he couldn’t achieve them, and it made him feel horrible about himself.”

‘I’m crying, I’m angry’

Performing a man is not the same thing as being a man. There can be a security in the performance, though, because it sidesteps the difficulty that confronting emotions and thoughts entails. One of the Men’s Voices conversations that most struck me was one in which an interviewee admits the emotional challenge of walking his dog – because being alone, without the surrounding noise of work, sport and banter, can be hard:

“I find myself, the longer the walk goes, [getting] more upset … Well, actually, more de-stressed – but through that period to being de-stressed, I’m crying, I’m angry, I’m running … It takes a while to get to that place.”

What some men need – not only in the north-east, but in all those areas of life (private and public) where an old, familiar order has broken down and men have yet to let in different kinds of identity – is help getting them to that place; acknowledging rather than avoiding the difficulty of the transition. Focusing attention on the everyday crises that people are facing is part of that. Support (together with its counterpart: governmental relieving of the policies and ideologies that put men, and women, in economic and social hardship) is another.

And such support is growing. The Men’s Cree project in County Durham is one such initiative. Set up by the East Durham Community Trust in 2010, each cree (a vernacular word for a pigeon shed) provides an encouraging environment for men to come and simply talk. From 11 crees the project has grown, by the time of the council’s recent taking of the project in-house, to 41 across the whole of the county.

Much of the spread was achieved, the trust’s chief-executive Malcolm Fallow told me, by word of mouth: “At bus stands, or by people mentioning it to men who they knew had been bereaved or lost their job.” The success of the scheme is in its straightforwardness. There is always an activity – repairing bikes; growing vegetables; stonemasonry; heritage site visits – around and through which the men can talk to each other.

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Fallow related one especially moving story about a former miner who used to do the shopping “for his wife”, as the man saw it, and would not tell her if he knew she had missed items off the list, knowing it would mean he’d get another trip to the shop. “That would fill his afternoon in. But once he had the [pigeon] shed to go to, that wasn’t necessary.”

For this man, as for many others who have benefited from the project, simply finding a new activity to organise his time around improved his mental health. Replacing an entrenched structure with nothing is an inevitable cause of real crisis. Replacing it with a new box to be put in is not healthy either.

Dialogue, openness, empathy and equality are what is needed by us all – men and women – both to aid those in trouble, and to move the crisis conversation on from “how to be a man” to “how to be a person”.

source: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/oct/06/men-or-mice-is-masculinity-in-crisis-ross-raisin